1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a contact cap for a dental tooth measuring apparatus as an ancillary apparatus for shooting applied at shooting (measuring) in the dental tooth measuring apparatus and a measuring method using the dental tooth measuring apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
When treatment with an artificial tooth (implant) is given to a patient at a dental clinic, especially an artificial tooth for an incisor is put, the colors of the patient's vital teeth (or non-vital teeth) to be adjacent to the incisor need to be measured by some method and compared for selecting an artificial tooth with suitable color for the teeth. As a method for measuring a shade of a tooth at present, the patient's teeth are compared with reference plates called a shade guide, and decide the number of the shade guide which is visually determined as the nearest shade by the dentist as the shade of the tooth. With the number, bleaching effect is checked or the number is notified to a dental technician's office to make an artificial tooth (implant).
In the conventional method of deciding a shade of an artificial tooth by visually determining with the abovementioned shade guide, the determination is susceptible to lighting and even the same tooth of the same patient may be determined as a different shade depending on the type of lighting in the room or influence of an outside light. The determination may also largely diversify according to the physical condition of the dentist (or the dental technician) that performs the determination so that it is difficult to satisfactorily select an artificial tooth.
What needed is a dental tooth measuring apparatus (shooting apparatus) which can shoot a corresponding tooth needed for correctly acquiring a shade of the tooth without being affected by lighting or a determiner under such circumstances and can acquire correct shade information of the tooth by the image information. As for the dental tooth measuring apparatus (shooting apparatus), a dental camera of the Patent Document 1 or a buccal cavity shooting apparatus of the Patent Document 2 are disclosed.
For the dental camera disclosed in the Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-355263 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 1), a mouthpiece is used as a hood to be attached to an opening for shooting. The mouthpiece has an engaging protrusion section and wing section, which position a tooth to be measured.
The buccal cavity shooting apparatus in the Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-305429 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 2) is for shooting a buccal cavity by applying a bitten mouthpiece to a light shielding cover attached to the apparatus.
When shooting is actually performed by the abovementioned tooth measuring apparatus, a single tooth (vital tooth) needs to be closely shot. If shooting is merely performed in a conventional closely shooting state, it is inevitably affected by lighting. Then, shooting needs to be performed under lighting of special light. In such a case, an outside light needs to be shielded and a contact cap for shooting which makes a hood for positioning an objective tooth more close to a shooting position needs to be attached to a camera. Fine adjustment needs to be made to the angle of gradient of the tooth to be measured, as the surface of a part to be measured is not necessarily kept in an upright position to the optical axis for shooting in a positioned state at shooting.